I have back pain doctors can't explain

What this looks like

You’ve been in back pain for months or years. Your MRI shows the things MRIs show: minor disc bulges, age-appropriate changes, nothing that should produce the pain you’re having. You’ve changed your pillow, your mattress, your chair, your shoes. You’ve started avoiding lifts and certain positions. The avoidance reduced what you can do without changing the pain.

You’re in real pain. The structural cause isn’t where the imaging has been looking.

What you’ve already tried

• Physical therapy, sometimes for years
• Chiropractic
• Massage and dry needling
• Pain medications
• Steroid injections
• A new chair, mattress, pillow
• Yoga and stretching
• Surgery, for some, that didn’t help

You’re still in pain.

What’s your stress signature?

Why the structural treatments hit their ceiling

You very likely came out of a stretch in your life where you started bracing your back without knowing it. You may have grown up in a household where you absorbed everyone else’s tension and your back became one of the places you stored it. You may have lived through an injury that taught your back to brace and never finished retraining out of the bracing. You may have built a life where you have to hold yourself together physically for hours at a time, and your back has been doing the holding.

The structural treatments addressed problems that may or may not have been the actual source. The pain that survives them is functional. You’re bracing your back muscles chronically. The bracing produces pain. The pain makes you brace more because you’re afraid to move. The avoidance trains the bracing to be even more constant.

For the broader pattern, see I have psychosomatic symptoms and I have chronic pain doctors can’t explain .

You’re using your back to brace against something. We work on what you’ve been bracing against.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy treats what your back has been bracing against, working alongside whatever physical care you’re already doing. We identify the load you’ve been holding and the situations where the bracing locks in. As what you’ve been bracing against gets handled, the muscle pattern producing the pain has nothing left to do.

Your back returns to being a back, not a daily warning system.